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Monday, January 26, 2004
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To Summarize...
In a recent posting to the weblog Planned Obsolescence, Scott McLemee, an award-winning writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, touches on virtually every one of the characteristics of the genus Humanities Scholar that I've tried to identify on this blog. See if you can spot them all [his remarks were occasioned by the response of quite a few English professors to a mildly mocking little piece about the MLA Convention he wrote for the Chronicle]: “I have been repeatedly called insulting by people who sometimes begin to froth a bit while calling me an idiot, a homophobe, a failed academic, etc. The latter in particular is amusing. It tends to confirm one's darkest suspicions about the insular narcissism of people whose chief virtue is not intellectual seriousness but a certain docility (as Bourdieu puts it) in their relationship with institutions. Now, that's not meant as a blanket denunciation of academics. (Some of my best friends, etc.) In fact, I spend about 99 percent of my time reading scholarly work, and writing about it in such a fashion as to make it better understood -- not simply beyond the academy, but within it. To be candid, I do wonder sometimes whether it is worth the trouble. The lack of curiosity, let alone intellectual vitality, among academics is often really astonishing. Maybe it's just exhaustion? Or rather, the ennui of life as alienated cogs in bureaucratic engines? Anyway, once in a while, I will write with tongue in cheek. The effect, it seems, is to bring out paranoia, in full blaze. An item of perhaps 400 words is part of the "anti-intellectual" jihad of "hate" against long-suffering professors? For what it is worth, the whole point of my little article was to suggest that some MLA participants themselves appear to have entered a kind of symbiotic relationship with the media, giving papers [ridiculous] titles precisely in an effort to win that little moment in the spotlight. Hence the idea of giving them the red carpet treatment through an awards ceremony, a la the Oscars. Not one person seems to have detected that implicit element of criticism within the piece. (It seems a lot more damning than pointing out that professors are sometimes would-be hipsters etc.) Calling it "anti-intellectual" reveals a really impoverished conception of the life of the mind.” |